Starring: Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Costner, Maria Bello and Chris Cooper
Directed and Written By: John Wells
Produced By: Claire Rudnick Polstein, Paula Weinstein and John Wells
Distributor: The Weinstein Company
Rating: R
Running Time: Approximately 104 minutes
Website: companymenmovie.com
Budget: $15 million
Genre: Drama
Release Date: February 11, 2011
Those who demand nothing but pure escapism from their movies had better steer clear of The Company Men, a film very much of the moment, this moment, the financial meltdown of 2008 that ushered in the current recession. The only explosions here are in boardrooms and offices, the only fictional hero to be seen is an ethical executive, Gene McClary (Tommy Lee Jones), a high-ranking official in a fictional Boston-based transportation company facing down massive layoffs and corporate cutbacks in the midst of his own midlife crisis.
It’s all at the behest of his boss and friend, James Salinger (Craig T. Nelson), and any number of friends and colleagues are caught in the swath of mass firings bent on keeping stock prices up in the midst of the flailing economy. Among the struck down is Bobby (Ben Affleck), a family man in his late 30s who goes from bragging about his golf score to packing up his desk. The firing of Bobby, an up-and-comer at the firm, terrifies Phil (Chris Cooper), an aging exec who had worked his way up in the company from the factory floor and now faces an uncertain future.
The Company Men follows Bobby, Gene, and Phil in freefall as they attempt to overcome the unexpected new turns in their lives. Their problems are not entirely relatable – most of us will never know the pain of selling our Porsches to pay the mortgage, let alone deal with that symbol of corporate excess, the private jet. But for each of these men the sudden shift in the world around them is a seismic one.
Writer-director John Wells is no stranger to raw doses of reality in his storytelling. Wells has a long list of gritty television dramas to his name, “ER,” “Southland,” and “The West Wing” most prominent among them. Those shows had a way of portraying sober realism even in extreme circumstances, and The Company Men is no different. There’s plenty of healthy skepticism toward the atmosphere and hubris of modern American business, mostly articulated by Bobby’s blue-collar brother-in-law, Jack (Kevin Costner, using a chowdah-thick New England accent), and reinforced by real news clips of real corporate excess even after the bailout. The movie spends its balance wavering between condemning the haughtiness of its humbled characters and showing true sympathy for overqualified men who are robbed of the promise of their careers and their educations.
The Company Men is a hard movie to watch. It’s not that it’s badly made movie (it’s not) and it’s not that the cast doesn’t make these men and their families real characters (they do). It’s that for many viewers, the wound is still fresh. There is such a thing as reality being TOO raw, even in Hollywood dressing; hell, when Ben Affleck is having trouble, what can that possibly mean for the rest of us? Wells gives his characters humor – Bobby’s chagrin at a job placement agency’s self-esteem exercises is especially ripe – and human flaws, as in Gene’s May-December affair with his a fellow executive (Maria Bello).
By the end there’s even something resembling hope for most of these characters, though none of them make it out unscathed. The lesson is that bad things happen to good people and sometimes the bad guys win – watch Nelson’s CEO character waltz away richer than ever before – and that’s more bracing than any of Bobby’s family problems, Phil’s humiliated begging for jobs, or Gene’s isolation from his wife. What Wells has created with The Company Men is probably not the definitive film of this early 21st century recession, but it bubbles with enough involving melodrama and righteous anger to provoke a response. It’s a movie to anger up the blood and re-examine priorities by, with a sympathetic core that goes beyond non-issue issues like how to pay the country club membership.
3 Stars
